Page 82 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

sized area called the Kalasasaya (a word in the local Aymara language
meaning simply ‘Place of the Upright Standing Stones’ ). And the giant
5
was one of the huge time-worn pieces of sculpture referred to by
Garcilaso de la Vega.
I was eager to take a look at it, but for the moment my attention was
diverted southwards towards an artificial hill, 50 feet high, which lay
almost directly ahead of me as I climbed the steps out of the sunken
temple. The hill, which had also been mentioned by Garcilaso, was known
as the Akapana Pyramid. Like the pyramids at Giza in Egypt, it was
oriented with surprising precision towards the cardinal points. Unlike
those pyramids its ground-plan was somewhat irregular. Nonetheless, it
measured roughly 690 feet on each side which meant that it was a
hulking piece of architecture and the dominant edifice of Tiahuanaco.
I walked towards it now, and spent some time strolling around it and
clambering over it. Originally it had been a clean-sided step-pyramid of
earth faced with large andesite blocks. In the centuries since the
conquest, however, it had been used as a quarry by builders from as far
away as La Paz, with the result that only about ten per cent of its superb
facing blocks now remained.
What clues, what evidence, had those nameless thieves carried off with
them? As I climbed up the broken sides and around the deep grassy
troughs in the top of the Akapana, I realized that the true function of the
pyramid was probably never going to be understood. All that was certain
was that it had not been merely decorative or ceremonial. On the
contrary, it seemed almost as though it might have functioned as some
kind of arcane ‘device’ or machine. Deep within its bowels, archaeologists
had discovered a complex network of zig-zagging stone channels, lined
with fine ashlars. These had been meticulously angled and jointed (to a
tolerance of one-fiftieth of an inch), and had served to sluice water down
from a large reservoir at the top of the structure, through a series of
descending levels, to a moat that encircled the entire site, washing
against the pyramid’s base on its southern side.
6
So much care and attention had been lavished on all this plumbing, so
many man-hours of highly skilled and patient labour, that the Akapana
made no sense unless it had been endowed with a significant purpose. A
number of archaeologists, I knew, had speculated that this purpose might
have been connected with a rain or river cult involving a primitive
veneration of the powers and attributes of fast-flowing water.
One sinister suggestion, which implied that the unknown ‘technology’
of the pyramid might have had a lethal purpose, was derived from the
meaning of the words Hake and Apana in the ancient Aymara language

5 H. S. Bellamy and P. Allan, The Calendar of Tiahuanaco: The Measuring System of the
Oldest Civilization, Faber & Faber, London, 1956, p. 16.
6 For a detailed discussion of the hydraulic system of the Akapana see Tiahuanacu: II,
pp. 69-79.

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